A Kickstarter for real estate gets a big boost

FORTUNE — As crowdfunding has grown from a niche fundraising method to a legitimate platform that leverages the everyman to fund projects of all sizes and kinds, the finance model has worked its way into a variety of industries. Exhibit A might be real estate, where there are now a dozen or more platforms offering individuals the ability to fund real estate projects. Now one of the leaders in the field, Fundrise, is announcing a round of funding that will likely put the sector on the map in a bigger way.

Self-funded until now, Washington, DC- based Fundrise has raised $31 million in a Series A round led by Chinese social networking giant Renren and including the top management of Silverstein Properties—the firm’s CEO Marty Burger and chief investment officer Tal Kerret—as well as the Collaborative Fund, the sharable economy-focused firm that’s backed the likes of Kickstarter, TaskRabbit and Lyft.

Founded in 2010 by brothers Ben and Daniel Miller, Fundrise offers individual investors the chance to invest directly in the commercial real estate around them—a market dominated by institutional investors and, with the exception of REITs, typically off limits to all but the wealthiest individuals. (“As an individual, it’s easier to invest in a foreign country than to invest in a property across the street,” the company’s website says.)

While other crowdfunding real estate companies focus on specific niches like house flipping, or offer a purely transactional platform, Fundrise’s approach is a little different, playing up the social good that comes from the ability to help shape one’s own community. The domination of large institutional investors in real estate investment, Fundrise maintains, leads to fund managers who are disconnected from the places they invest in, leading to buildings and cookie-cutter projects that may not be the right “fit” for the local market. Residents on the ground, on the other hand, often have a keen sense of the peculiarities of their market (who among us doesn’t consider ourselves an armchair Donald Trump?) and should be empowered to have a say in what gets built in their neighborhood—and to benefit from the upside.

How it works is relatively straightforward: developers list projects on Fundrise, and investors buy shares in the project for anywhere from $100 to $5,000. The investors can make money on rent, if the development is leased, and on the appreciation of the real estate.

So far, developers using the site have closed investments for around 30 projects totaling some $15 million, but the site is scaling fast; Co-founder Ben Miller says it is raising money at the rate of $1 million a week. Most deals are in New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Philadelphia.

The new funding will let the brothers open in new markets like Seattle and San Francisco. Interestingly, it will also be used to open the platform up to institutional investors. Miller says the founders discovered that individuals can only raise so much money; to scale big real estate projects, they learned, requires some institutional investment. “We found that if you have 1,000 or 2,000 investors, that [will add up to] a few million, but if the project is $10 million, you need $8 million more,” Miller says. “You need to get the scale.” That may change as the platform continues to grow, Miller says. But he also thinks big investors will see the value of investing alongside members of a community, a group that brings “social capital” to a project, which can help ease approvals in the often fraught urban building process.

Fundrise’s new investors may help get big investors on board. In addition to the top management at Silverstein, other investors include Chris Rising of California office real estate giant Rising Realty Partners; Ackman-Ziff Real Estate Group; Richard Boyle, partner at Khosla Ventures and former CEO of commercial real estate online marketplace LoopNet; and Scott Plank, a former executive of Under Armour (and brother of founder Kevin Plank) who started his own real estate development firm.

The brothers Miller have real estate in their blood. Their father is Herbert S. Miller, a prominent real estate developer who developed mixed use projects in the Washington area and is perhaps best known to some for founding the “Mills” chain of super regional outlet centers. (Philadelphians have the elder Miller to thank for Franklin Mills and the ability to experience, for a time, the nirvana of having Neiman Marcus’ Last Call and Saks Fifth Avenue’s Off Fifth together under a single roof.)

Critics of Fundrise have pointed out that it’s a risky investment for the average retail investor: real estate investments are highly illiquid, and investors are at the mercy of the experience and skill of the developers with whom they invest. And as anyone in real estate knows, investing in projects often entails making speculative bets that can be derailed by elements outside anyone’s control—a problem tenant, unanticipated setbacks in the permitting and approval process, a deal falling through, a superstorm.

Miller counters that Fundrise is an alternative investment, and investors should treat it as such and adhere to the normal rule of thumb not to put more than 10% into that category. He adds that with a low minimum of $100 per investment, it’s easy for investors to diversify among types and locations of projects within the Fundrise portfolio.

But risk, as anyone knows, is part and parcel of investing in real estate; there’s a reason it isn’t for the faint of heart. Just ask Donald Trump.

Southwest Airlines’ new cause: ‘Placemaking’

FORTUNE — Southwest Airlines is known for its folksy, quirky, egalitarian ethos, from its cut-rate fares and jokes from the flight attendants to its ticker symbol, LUV, to its unique corporate culture. In the past year or two, the airline has fallen for a cause that it feels matches its core values: “placemaking,” a movement within the field of urban planning that leverages the people and assets in a community to reimagine its public spaces. In one of Southwest’s more ambitious philanthropic initiatives to date, it has entered a multifaceted partnership with the movement’s leading non-profit, Project for Public Spaces, in a wide-ranging commitment to improve and revitalize the public spaces in a number of American cities.

Under the new initiative — announced today as the Southwest Airlines Heart of the Community program — Southwest and PPS will work together to administer grants to multiple cities to transform their public spaces. They partnered quietly on two pilot projects last year, in Detroit and Providence, R.I.; and earlier this week they launched their third collaboration in San Antonio, the “activation” of the city’s historic Travis Park.

“We were looking for a way to support our communities, but also where we could really provide some leadership,” says Gary Kelly, Southwest’s chairman, president, and CEO — and a San Antonio native whose grandfather went to the Methodist church on the Travis Park square. “There was a void in placemaking, and it’s something we have a passion about,” Kelly tells Fortune.

Unlike other forms of urban planning or urban revitalization, placemaking is a community-based process that links urban design with the needs and desires of its inhabitants. (Think of it as crowdsourcing for the design of public squares and plazas.) It evolved out of the work of urbanists like Jane Jacobs, who preached the benefits of citizen ownership of neighborhood assets, and more notably, from the work of William H. Whyte, the urban sociologist — and legendary Fortune writer before that — who used time-lapse photography to record and observe human behavior in urban settings. Whyte maintained that the design of public spaces should start with an understanding of the way people use them, and his principles paved the way for the modern understanding of the use of public spaces. (It’s worth noting Whyte’s significant contributions to Fortune: His seminal 1956 book The Organization Man, which came to define a generation of workers, emerged out of articles he wrote for Fortune on management; he also coined the phrases ‘groupthink’ and ‘suburban sprawl’ in our pages — all before his second career.) The Project for Public Spaces was founded by one of Whyte’s disciples, Fred Kent.

Placemaking is a niche, somewhat cerebral discipline that might seem at odds with a blue chip airline, and Southwest’s Kelly admits it “took a little time to understand what it is.” But the company saw a grassroots, bottom-up, egalitarian approach—placemaking projects engage members of the community from conception to finish, and solutions are often low-cost and common-sense, like using chalk and and moveable lawn chairs— that Southwest felt blended well with its culture and esprit de corps. (In Travis Park, new amenities include a sandbox, umbrellas, moveable tables and chairs, and public programming including fitness classes, free movies and game tournaments.) Southwest sees a chance to take the movement more mainstream. “We think it could be the new environmentalism,” says Linda Rutherford, the airline’s vice president of communication and outreach, who championed the idea of committing to placemaking.

“Placemaking is about making the shaping of cities more accessible to everybody,” says Ethan Kent, senior vice president of PPS, “Much in the same way [Southwest] made air travel accessible to many more people.” The partnership with Southwest is the biggest the organization has ever done, he says. “We love the personality they bring to it.”

The path from Southwest to placemaking began when Rutherford was searching for a cause the airline could get behind. Canvassing employees and people in their communities, she says, the topic of community revitalization kept coming up. From there, she entered into discussions with PPS and discovered a shared spirit between the two entities. “We really found a kindred spirit,” Rutherford says. As part of the partnership, Southwest also funded a report by MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning about the potential of placemaking in community-building — the movement’s first significant ivory tower affirmation.

Like the Travis Park initiative, which partnered with San Antonio’s Center City Development Office, the earlier Heart of the Community projects also worked in concert with local institutions. In Detroit, PPS and Southwest worked with the Downtown Detroit Partnership to transform an underutilized lawn in Campus Martius Park into a seasonal beach with a deck and seating; in Providence, they worked with the Downtown Providence Parks Conservancy to create the Imagination Center, a new facility for family activities in the city’s Burnside Park.

“We’re real excited about it,” says Kelly of the partnership. “It’s tangible. And it’s not so gigantic that you can’t accomplish something. We’re proud of the grant, but it’s not like it takes $100 million to come out and revitalize Travis Park. It’s something that can come to reality very quickly.” The Southwest and PPS team had only been working on the square for 90 days, he points out.

Airbnb cozies up to cities

The “sharing economy” pioneer launches an ambitious new partnership with Portland, Ore. — and a new model for enriching the cities in which it operates. (Think philanthropy, free smoke detectors, and … a way to collect taxes.)

Portland, Oregon

FORTUNE — For all of Airbnb’s rapid growth, reports of its latest mega-valuation and its pioneering place in the sharing economy zeitgeist, the company’s reception in — and relationship with — the cities in which it operates has been less than smooth. Some municipalities say it should pay taxes. Others say its dwelling-sharing practice is illegal. To address some of these issues, and to try to become more of an asset to the municipalities it serves, Airbnb today will unveil a new ambitious plan for a concept it calls “Shared City,” a multi-faceted collaboration designed to give back to the communities it serves — beginning with the city of Portland, Ore. and expected to be rolled out to cities around the world.

“Imagine if you could build a city that is shared,” Chesky writes in an in-depth post on Medium laying out the new plan that feels somewhere between Jane Jacobs meets Richard Florida with a 2014, shareable-economy twist. “Where people become micro-entrepreneurs, and local mom and pops flourish once again. Imagine a city that fosters community. Where space isn’t wasted, but shared with others.” In the post, Chesky describes his vision for “Shared City,” a new initiative from the company to “help civic leaders and our community create more shareable, more livable cities through relevant, concrete actions and partnerships.”

For Portland, Ore., it means a plan to leverage the Airbnb community to contribute economic, social, and environmental improvements to the city. The multi-pronged arrangement is as ambitious as it is specific: For starters, under the new deal, Airbnb will make it possible for hosts to donate a percentage of the money they earn on Airbnb to a local cause — to determined by its hosts and the city of Portland — and it will match the donations through a percentage of its fees.

Part of the deal is connected to the company’s new companywide push on home safety: Airbnb will also make free smoke and carbon monoxide detectors available to every host who requests one in Portland. (The company now requires that all hosts install smoke and carbon monoxide detectors by the end of 2014.) The company has also started working with the city’s Bureau of Emergency Management to establish training programs to help its hosts respond to crises like natural disasters or other local emergencies.

Airbnb is also working with the city’s tourism bureau, Visit Portland, on joint campaigns to promote the city and its small businesses — and it says it will work to weed out “corporate property managers who abuse our platform, hurt the city’s housing stock, and give guests a bad experience,” according to Chesky’s manifesto.

Perhaps most notably, the company says it is finalizing a plan with Portland to collect and remit taxes to the city on behalf of its hosts. Under the new proposal (yet to be approved by Portland’s City Council), Airbnb would collect an 11.5% tax based on what guests pay to hosts (the 11.5% representing the City of Portland’s 6% and Multnomah County’s 5.5% transient lodging taxes). The tax would be collected by Airbnb out of guests’ payment and sent quarterly to the city of Portland.

The partnership represents months of discussions with Portland Mayor Charlie Hales. “We get a lot of questions about, ‘What is going to be the fate of Airbnb and cities?’” Chesky tells Fortune. “I wanted to proactively put together a vision for how we can work with cities.”

The proposal to collect taxes also marks the first official attempt to address some of the company’s vexing tax issues.

Last October, Chesky publicly said that Airbnb believes its hosts should be paying local taxes. But he says it’s complicated to mandate that they do; coming to any agreement, the company has found, involves partnerships, complicated red tape, and in some cases changing laws to make it possible. “It’s shockingly complicated and takes a lot of work on both sides,” he says.

Under the current Portland proposal, it will be up to hosts to decide whether to charge the tax — and whether to raise their prices to account for it. “I think they’ll have to make the decision of what they do with the pricing,” he says. “It’s not a huge amount.” ‘

But the Portland deal is the first of a new model Chesky hopes to export to other cities — a handful at first, then dozens, then perhaps “a lot more in a long-term scalable way.”

A key element to the Shared City initiative is that its concepts and principles can be adapted and molded to each city’s specific needs. Some cities might need help with homelessness, for example, while others’ priorities may be attracting tourism or drawing funding for the arts or, yes, collecting taxes — all goals Airbnb is prepared to leverage its community and footprint to help with.

Chesky says the company has had discussions with a half-dozen cities already and hopes to sign up “a handful” more by this summer.

Many tech companies have become enamored with urbanism of late — witness Tony Hsieh’s redevelopment of downtown Las Vegas, the new social network for neighborhoods, Nextdoor (“neighborhoods were the original social network,” the startup says) or the carefully designed urban elements of Facebook’s campus. But with this new array of public-private partnerships, Airbnb is getting deeper into the weeds. The Shared City program comes out of the company’s civics team, a division headed by Molly Turner, Harvard-educated urban planner (see the essay Turner wrote about being an urban planner in the tech world).

In May, Airbnb will be a main sponsor of Jane’s Walk NYC, a weekend-long festival of guided walks that celebrate the legacy of the urban activist Jane Jacobs. Chesky himself has been reading up on urban planning books; his manifesto explaining the concept goes back to the origin of cities and calls them the “original sharing platforms:” “They formed at ancient crossroads of trade, and grew through collaboration and sharing resources.”

The Shared City venture is also the result of Chesky talking to hosts and holding meet-ups in various cities over the past year asking members of the Airbnb community what they cared about. “The idea kind of came out of real life,” he says. He penned the Medium post over the New Year holiday this year while traveling through Asia.

“I really, really want to have a great relationship with cities,” he says. “The last thing I want to be is in an antagonistic place with them,” he says. “We want to enrich the cities and neighborhoods we serve.”

Chesky says he first thought about calling the program “Model City” but thought “Shared City” was a better representation of the company’s overall mission.

“We wanted to do something proactive in a city to show what’s possible,” he says. “I hope this shows what more is possible.”

Rahm Emanuel: Given a choice, Americans want cities over burbs

FORTUNE — The suburbs are losing out to cities when it comes to where people want to live, according to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

The former Chief of Staff to President Obama is famous for his bold statements and blunt talk. And as the Mayor of Chicago, it might not be so surprising that he’d be promoting his own city center.

But Emanuel had fighting words for the lifestyle so historically and inextricably linked to the American Dream.

In a wide-ranging discussion about Chicago’s growth in the nearly three years since he was sworn in, Emanuel described a number of ways in which the city has outperformed: Its downtown is one of the fastest growing in the country; a number of Fortune 500 companies have relocated their headquarters there; when the current plan to expand O’Hare is finished, the airport’s flight capacity will surpass that of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson.

But one theme kept coming up: Whether in Chicago or elsewhere, Emanuel said, Americans are increasingly turning away from conventional bedroom communities. “When given the choice,” he said, “people want to live in a vibrant city. No one wants to live in the suburbs anymore.”

The Mayor set Chicago’s growth in the context of the overall urban “renaissance” happening across the country. But Chicago stands apart for a few reasons. One is the degree to which it’s drawn Fortune 500 companies to relocate there. Across the country, companies are ditching big suburban office parks in favor of new downtown headquarters, but Chicago is Exhibit A: In just the past few years, United Continental Holdings UAL, Motorola Mobility, Hillshire Brands HSH have all moved their headquarters from the nearby burbs to downtown Chicago; Archer Daniels Midland ADM is in the process of doing so; and last year GE Transportation GE relocated to Chicago from Erie, Pa.

This is happening elsewhere in the country too — see Panasonic’s recent move from Secaucus, N.J. to downtown Newark, First Round Capital leaving West Conshohocken, Pa. for Philadelphia, and the hottest Bay Area startup activity shifting from Silicon Valley to San Francisco itself. But nowhere are the examples as big or abundant as in Chicago.

As grateful as he is for the Fortune 500 love, Emanuel said it’s the city’s universities and research facilities that matter more — because they guarantee a talent pipeline and “labor certainty” for the corporate giants. He cites Chicago’s 13 higher education institutions — he meets with their presidents once a quarter — as well as research facilities like the Knapp Center for Biomedical Discovery at the University of Chicago and a new $320 million digital manufacturing research hub announced last month by President Obama and financed by a broad government and private sector partnership.

Without these facilities, Emanuel said, the blue chips wouldn’t come. “I couldn’t be happier about GE Transportation,” he said. “But the biomedical center is far more important” in terms of guaranteeing GE the ability to draw talent. “The research drives it,” he says.

The city is modernizing its entire public transit system (including the Blue Line, which goes to O’Hare and from which a train derailed Monday injuring some 30 people) and adding 4G broadband — a move that’s all the more critical given last week’s news that public transit ridership nationwide hit record levels last year. (Employers like it when their employees take public transit to work, Emanuel pointed out, because it means they can keep working.)

Schools are a critical part of the city-vs.-suburb equation, of course, and overhauling Chicago’s public school system — along with an ongoing fiscal crisis and a crackdown on crime — is one of the Mayor’s biggest priorities and greatest challenges. He cited proof of a schools turnaround: The city’s “on-track” graduation rate, an estimate of where the graduation rate will be in five years that was 55% a decade ago, is 80% today. The city has the biggest International Baccalaureate program in the country, he noted, and four of the five best-ranked public high schools in the state are in Chicago (though all are selective magnet schools). It’s home to new models for education including the Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy recently featured on the cover of Time.

Emanuel vowed that if the schools deliver, parents will stay in the city instead of decamping for the burbs. He cited long, expensive commutes for families who can’t afford the gas, and Chicago’s abundant single-family home housing stock as reasons more families will shun suburbia. “Give a parent a good public school, and they won’t leave,” he says. “People want to be in the city.”

The Chicago Mayor is the latest boldfaced name to make the claim that the suburbs are falling out of favor with Americans. Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who presided over a historic revitalization of New York during his 12 years as mayor, told an audience at the New York Economic Club in December that “it’s clear that the golden age of the suburb is over.” And speaking recently on CNBC, Chicago real estate mogul Sam Zell talked about the “end of suburbia” (or what he referred to as “ticky-tackyville”). “All you need to do is make the school systems in the cities triple A,” Zell said. “And then why would anyone live in the suburbs?”

Housing’s most important jobs number

FORTUNE — While the increasingly complex jobs report gets picked apart each month for its myriad indicators — wage growth, ranks of the long-term unemployed, job growth by sector, labor force participation rate and more — one number that often gets overlooked is the most critical for our housing sector, and it’s not construction industry employment: It’s the employment number for young adults, the percent of 25- to 34-year-olds who have jobs.

So says Jed Kolko, Trulia’s chief economist and vice president of analytics. The reason is fairly logical, if you’ve been following the headlines (or if you’re the parent of someone this age): Too many members of this group are still living at home with mom and dad, suppressing the natural household formation cycle. The more of them who move out, the more new households will be formed, and the more homes will be bought or rented. And the more young people are employed, the more likely they are to move out.

Before the housing bubble, young adult employment hovered pretty consistently in the 78-80% range, Kolko points out. During the depths of the recession, it plunged to 73.5% and stayed there for much of 2011. (It had been “a disaster,” Kolko says.) It jumped up in 2012 to the 75% range and went up and down for a bit but has been basically “drunkenly staggering upward” since then, Kolko says.

Last month, the employment rate for young adults showed the first real sign of improvement, ticking upward to 75.9% from 75.4% the year earlier. And while that might not seem like much of a move, each percentage point represents 400,000 people — and that increase marks the highest level the figure has hit in five years.

Each new twentysomething household, of course, means more IKEA sofas, West Elm sheet sets, espresso makers, kegerators, and the like. They need not buy a home to move the needle: They represent a large share of first-time homebuyers, but even as renters the newly launched will spend to “set up house,” as Kolko says. The most important thing is that they simply get out from under the comfortable confines of chez mom and dad — and having a job makes it way more likely that they’ll do that. Only 12% of this age group who have jobs live at home, where 20% of the unemployed do.

Record numbers of this group shacked up with their parents in the wake of the recession — 31.6% of 18- to 34-year-olds (this metric defines the age group slightly differently) were living with their parents in 2012, a post-recession high (remember that New Yorker cover?). That figure has fallen to 31.3% as of March 2013, the last available figure, but it’s still far above the pre-bubble norm: From 2000 to 2005 the figure was roughly 27%.

The data’s a little flawed for a few reasons — for example, if someone is in school and lives in a dorm for most of the year but lives at home in the summer, that person is counted as living with his or her parents. And other factors may drive this generation’s propensity to homestay — the remnants of helicopter parenting, for instance, which has both made living at home not just tolerated but in many cases embraced by parents. As well, so many of them are living at home that it’s also lessened the overall stigma associated with it. But those societal changes, Kolko says, tend to move very slowly, only impacting the numbers significantly over long periods of time. The big shifts in the numbers we’ve seen in the past few years, he says, are driven by economics.

Even with the increase, don’t expect a shift in the housing market immediately. It takes a while for the young adult employment rate to significantly move the household formation figures — “You don’t get a job one day and then move out the next,” says Kolko. The job market will need to improve for young adults before they contribute significantly to the housing market. “But it would be hard to get a lot of new household formation without a better jobs picture,” he says.

Ironically, Kolko points out, an improvement in the job market may result in a decline in the actual home ownership rate for this group. Since so many are likely to rent first then buy, it means that the economy will be adding young renters faster than young owners — and just by virtue of being counted, as these twentysomethings wake up and stumble into the housing market, they may depress the rate a bit (just as when more people enter the labor force who weren’t previously looking for work, the unemployment rate goes up).

The employment figure for young adults is a volatile one based on a small sample, so the month-to-month change matters less than the general trend, Kolko says. But the fact that the percentage is now hovering in the 75s instead of the 73s, he says, means there are close to a million more adults working — and the number is moving in the right direction. Simply speaking, Kolko says, “we have an unusually high share of young adults who may be on the verge of moving out.”

Paradise lost? How garden suburbs can save Detroit

FORTUNE — It’s humbling to write a book only to have a brand new tome on the same topic, one that dwarfs it in every possible way, land on your desk with a thud — a very loud thud.

Last August, I published a book about the suburbs (author shill: The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream is Moving), for which I immersed myself in the study of, and attempted to become an expert in, the suburbs. So it was with great interest that I learned last fall that a copy of a new, ambitious book about the very same subject by renowned architect Robert A.M. Stern was on its way to me. I was pleased that such a notable name had been drawn to the same topic.

But I wasn’t prepared for the moment Paradise Planned: The Garden Suburb and the Modern City (The Monacelli Press, December 2013) arrived on my desk. When it did, I was struck by two things: the book’s heft — at 1,072 pages and weighing 12.5 pounds, it is, simply speaking, gargantuan (see photo). It is the Taj Mahal of books. And then I was struck by its ambition: While there are thousands of photos and images, this is a vast, sweeping, extensive, meticulously researched, informative written work on an oft-overlooked topic.

Paradise Planned dwarfs The End of the Suburbs.

But no question, the first thing anyone notices about it is its monstrous size. It became a conversation piece when I hauled it with me in a tote bag to a friend’s book reading. People sitting near me started asking questions about the cartoonishly large book in my bag. Someone asked if it was a coffee table book; another person asked if it was actually a coffee table. There were Seinfeld jokes (if that confuses you, see here). You can’t not notice this book.

And that was precisely Stern’s point. Paradise Planned focuses narrowly, exclusively, and exhaustively on a single strain of suburb Stern believes has been widely and unfairly overlooked: the garden suburb. Originating in England in the late 18th century and adopted in the U.S. and northern Europe and ultimately elsewhere, the garden suburb had a short-lived history in the U.S., where it was nudged aside by the automobile in favor of today’s cul-de-sac plus strip-mall-plus-highway-interchange model of conventional suburban sprawl that covers most of our landscape.

According to Stern, the founding partner of Robert A.M. Stern Architects, dean of the School of Architecture at Yale University and architect behind such notable buildings as Manhattan’s 15 Central Park West, garden suburbs have not only been overlooked in the history of our suburbs but have been dismissed or even denigrated by the planning, architectural, and development communities. These “intellectuals,” in Stern’s view, either see them as a minor distraction in the history of our suburbs or unfairly lump them in with “the only kind of suburb the intelligentsia knows and loves to denigrate: that of placeless sprawl.” (I’m pretty sure he’s including me in there.) But, he argues, garden suburbs were in fact a “remarkable urbanistic achievement” deserving not only an entire study of their own, but a closer look by planners and officials as a model for the future of our cities.

Strictly speaking, a garden suburb is a planned, self-contained village or enclave located outside a major city (and sometimes within it) that includes a mixture of homes, often of similar architectural style, designed around a public center or square, usually with distinctive details like signage on the streets, sidewalks and lightposts — and always with ample green space and strategically placed parks of varying sizes. (They were an outgrowth of the Garden City movement pioneered by Sir Ebenezer Howard in England; they also have traits in common with the newer developments of the New Urbanist movement.) Some of the most iconic U.S. suburbs are garden suburbs: Think Shaker Heights, Ohio, Chestnut Hill, Pa., Highland Parks in both Dallas and outside Chicago. What Stern argues is so special about these meticulously planned communities is their ability to serve as the perfect hybrid — that is, they contain ample amounts of curving streets and bucolic greenery yet in an urban setting.

In 1,072 pages, though, this is not just a book about garden suburbs. It is an encyclopedia of them, or perhaps more appropriately, a zoologist’s field guide to them. Stern and his co-authors, David Fishman and Jacob Tilove, have ambitiously identified, labeled, and categorized genus, family, order, phylum, classification, and distribution of more than 800 garden suburbs. (Stern doesn’t do many things small; a previous book project, also with Fishman and Tilove, was a five-volume history of New York City’s architecture.) “I’m sure we missed a few,” he quipped to Fortune during a recent phone interview.

This classification comes in handy, because as is true with most suburbs, it’s hard to paint garden suburbs with a single brush. The authors break them into many different categories: conventional garden suburbs, garden “enclaves,” garden “villages,” urban suburbs, “resort” garden suburbs (places like Tuxedo Park, N.Y., if you’re wondering), and more. Then there’s Florida, a “national winter suburb.” (The book is hardly limited to the U.S.; it covers garden suburbs around the globe.)

These indeed are beautiful places; you realize skimming through that there’s a reason why some of the highest priced real estate outside big cities is often in garden suburbs (Beverly Hills, Calif., Chestnut Hill, Pa., Highland Park, Il.); though as the authors take care to point out, they were also commonly built for working-class communities. But from the first full-page picture in the book, an inviting image of a Tudor home on a leafy, gently curving street next to a sidewalk and a streetlamp in Forest Hills Gardens, Queens to images of grand, leafy neighborhoods with majestic oaks and wide, green-space boulevards, it’s further proof that we did something right before suburban sprawl ate everything up. Stern and I are in agreement here: Suburban sprawl is bad, but not everyone wants to live in a skyscraper in Manhattan; vast amounts of people want an option that’s more of an in-between. Garden suburbs are one kind of in-between. Because they predate our years of rampant expansion, most are located within close distances to their cities; many of them are within city limits. Some of Stern’s favorites, in fact, are in Queens: Forest Hills Gardens, Jackson Heights, and Sunnyside Gardens, which offer a sort of working, middle, and upper-middle class hat trick of garden burbs.

Garden suburbs may very well be at their finest within cities, in fact, and this is where Stern thinks they stand to have the most impact. The inner city is coming back in many places, but as he says, “nobody knows what to do with it.” In Detroit and in what he calls “middle cities” elsewhere — uninhabited or downtrodden areas within our cities — there is great potential for planned garden villages. “People would welcome the chance to live near downtown Detroit in a suburban-scale neighborhood with a community quality,” he says. He cites a series of garden suburbs in Bridgeport, Conn., which has had ongoing fiscal issues, that are thriving –“a paradise,” as he calls it.

Die-hard urbanists might take issue with the notion of the garden ‘burbs as the be-all, end-all, or what Stern and his coauthors describe as the need to “satisfy the very many who wish to be Hamiltonian by day and Jeffersonian by night.” Others might have trouble wrapping their arms around a simple definition of a garden suburb: Between the many genera and species of the kingdom, non-planners might find themselves needing a field guide to the field guide. But no one will say anything got left out. In addition to the cataloguing, there are entertaining narratives, mini-profiles of important characters throughout the movement, and relentless detail and color on each community.

And indeed, Stern and his coauthors are speaking as much to laypeople as to planners, architects, and developers who have a hand in creating the places we live. In the end, Stern says the book is really just trying to “thrill people” with the idea of and appeal of the garden suburb. “I want to get them to think about it and be more appreciative about what they have, or what might be three blocks away,” he says. He also hopes it will encourage people to encourage their elected officials to examine this model and rewrite legislation. The natural capitalist system, he points out, doesn’t easily turn over land for parks; it has to come from the planning process.

But planners and developers should, and will, take note too. Paradise Planned is an important study of an oft overlooked, important chapter in our residential and sociocultural history — what the authors call a “tragically interrupted 150-year-old tradition” — and it is a model we should draw from when thinking about how our communities can better meet the needs of the changing American Dream.

Besides, at $59 on Amazon.com, it’s hard not to agree with Stern, who points out you do get your money’s worth. “Pound for pound, you cannot find a better book,” he says.